7 Dark AF Ways Your Ancestors Had Fun

How would you like to own your own hand-power jitney balloon, to spend your Saturday afternoons joyriding in the sky, up a thousand feet or so, swinging beneath the round belly of a small gas-filled bag and traveling anywhere you can induce the playful breezes to take you?

That ... sounds terrible. Right? We're not the only ones who see a giant flashing neon sign telling us to run away? A thousand feet up? "Small gas-filled bag"? "Playful," aka suicidally strong, breezes? We're sorry, people of 1923, were the newly invented automobile and airplane already getting boring? Look, we don't want to accuse old-timey people of being stupid because they were old-timey, but seriously? Nutcases.

Amazingly, some people really thought this was a transportation breakthrough, and that soon we would all be floating around under own private gas-bags. But you won't be surprised to know that it was ridiculously dangerous, even for people who knew what they were doing. One early enthusiast was a Royal Air Force parachutist named Dobbs. You would think a man who trained other people how to safely bail out of planes would be the perfect person to get others interested in this new form of entertainment. And he did try, for a few years at least, putting on demonstrations for the public, hoping they would all run out and buy their own balloons and he wouldn't be so alone up there. But it kind of puts people off when you manage to die right in the middle of showing off how awesome and safe your new toy is, which is exactly what Dobbs did.

In 1927, he was doing his thing at the Stag Lane Aerodrome in North London when someone noticed he was jumping closer and closer to a high-tension cable. Despite hearing the warning that the wire was live, Dobbs shouted back that he would risk it and proceeded to try to jump over the cable. He is recorded as "nearly" clearing it, but "nearly" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. His feet got tangled in the wire, and when he reached down to try to free himself, he grabbed it and was electrocuted, throwing him down to the ground (so hey, it got him untangled!) and killing him on the spot.

And that, boys and girls, is why Mom and Dad don't hop/float to work to this day.

People must have gotten a kick out of it, because the game had staying power. It was played after the Spanish won the Battle of Navas de Tolosa over the Moors in 1212. It was part of the celebrations during a wedding between a prince and princess in Navarre. It was played in 1386 in Germany with a full dozen guys beating the pig and each other. But they had to eventually give those men a little help; they hit each other so many times that many of them ended up collapsing, so they put a bell on the pig and made them keep going. And an anonymous chronicler records it being played at a festival in Paris in 1425. That time, they even had a little parade for the four blind guys before the event, which was probably a nice memory to try to hold onto every time they got bashed in the head.

If you got bored with foxes, people also used rabbits, badgers, and "wildcats." These events were often a veritable slaughter, with hundreds of animals dead by the end. Still, sometimes the poor animals got their own back. Foxes and "wildcats" have claws, after all, and it was accepted that to play this game meant risking getting bitten or slashed. But the occupational hazards didn't stop its popularity, and even Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I would play at least once a year.

Anyone who missed the goose entirely would get doused in cold water, which doesn't really seem fair, considering what the bird is going through. It must have been a pretty hard game, since it often lasted for hours before someone finally killed the thing. The winner would get the goose, or sometimes a small cash prize, or just drinks at the pub afterwards. You put the poor, terrified bird through that for not a lot of reward. Oh, and this event traditionally took place on Shrove Tuesday, also known as the day before Lent starts, also known as the traditional day people get all the fun stuff out of their systems. So this is what people in the past really wanted to do before their 40 days of religious sobriety: rip a bird's head clean off with their bare hands.

Oh wait, did we say up there this died out in the 1800s? Yeah, about that. If you happen to be in parts of Germany, Belgium, or the Netherlands on Shrove Tuesday, to this day you might see people yanking the heads off geese in this manner. Thankfully, somewhere along the line, animal rights activists must have gotten involved, because at least now the goose is dead before they string it up.

Of course, just because the projectile you are getting shot with isn't a real bullet doesn't mean you can't get hurt. There were stories of both competitors and spectators losing eyes if a shot went wrong. Bits of body parts could also be removed, and one man who was interviewed about his experience dueling told how he accidentally shot off the fleshy bit between his opponent's thumb and pointer finger. He also warned that the fake bullets looked almost identical to real bullets, and that people had been killed when they mixed them up. Still, he said dueling was a "necessary evil," and that the ability to shoot at someone if they were rude made people polite. If that's true, considering the state of the world, maybe we should think about bringing it back.

That didn't stop their parents having fun with the fad, though. They had smaller models made that they would use during dinner to chop up bread and vegetables. Sometimes they would have small figures of politicians or other celebrities made and filled with a red perfume that would spurt everywhere when they were beheaded. Ladies would then dip their handkerchiefs in the perfume so they left the dinner smelling nice. The apparently bloodstained handkerchiefs would go well with their other accessory, guillotine earrings.

After all the killings stopped and the aristocracy came back into power, they wanted to show how proud they were of their relatives who had died. So both women and men started wearing their hair short in the back, as if it had been sliced off by the guillotine. Women wore red scarves to represent the blood and those worn by two famous women who had been executed. And at a ball held every year for people who could prove they were related to a victim of the guillotine, dancers would bow to each other in a jerking motion, as if their head had been lopped off. That would be like if everyone went to prom and the cool thing to do was lay on the ground and pretend you were getting a lethal injection.

Kathy wrote a very funny book called FUNERALS TO DIE FOR, and you can buy it here. Or follow her on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, or Twitter.

PS It's not like you can't still get a little guillotine for your desk.

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